PixelJunk Monsters EncoreReview

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Saving the villagers one more time.

By Ryan Clements

If you're a PlayStation 3 owner who fancies a little downloadable content here or there, you may have played a few rounds of PixelJunk Monsters, a tower defense title from Q-Games that mixes both real-time strategy and casual elements together. In fact, you might have played more than just a few rounds because PixelJunk Monsters is a great title and one of the best downloadable games on the PlayStation Network to date. But if you've unlocked all the villages on Tiki Island and unleashed the glorious power of the rainbow across every stage, you may be ready for more. Well now you can head back to the islands and start building towers all over again with PixelJunk Monsters Encore, an expansion pack for the original title.

If you haven't played the first game, PixelJunk Monsters tasked you with guiding a small character around various forest environments, building defensive towers out of trees to protect your helpless village from swarms of monsters. The appeal of Monsters came from the simplicity of the interface mixed with the overall depth of the experience. Although your only controls involved moving with the analog stick or d-pad and bringing up a single ring menu for tower building, the game's many different monsters and locales created a lot of engaging play time. In order to progress to a new area of Tiki Island, you had to prevent every monster from reaching your village (and subsequently killing one of your villagers), which would reward you with a rainbow.

Look out: it's the Zen Loop.

PixelJunk Monsters Encore, ultimately, expands on the original experience by giving you a new island full of levels to explore: Toki Island. There are about fifteen new stages organized in the same manner as the original batch. What might surprise Monsters enthusiasts is the fact that all your power-ups, which you presumably gained previously on Tiki Island (the ability to run, plant mines, etc.), are now gone and must be reacquired on the new locale. This can make the beginning levels very tricky, but I'll get to that in a moment.

As for the gameplay mechanics themselves, nothing overly dramatic has been changed. The most obvious difference is that now, Ice Towers are automatically unlocked and can be built from the start. However, as far as I can tell, there are no new towers or enemies to discover, which was a bit disappointing.

The real question at hand is how the new levels play. I really like the design of the Toki Island stages and they're a blast to play both on your own and with a friend. For example, one of the early stages, Zen Loop, places your village on the bottom left of the screen and monsters always approach from the upper left, but must walk a long loop around a patch of trees and mountains. This gives you a fair amount of time to build up your defenses but the tree placement still delivers a challenge.

Another stage worth noting is Splash Damage, which I found aesthetically pleasing as well as entertaining. The level is split vertically down the middle, with your island on one side and a body of water on the other. Not only do you have to protect the southern entrance of the environment, but hordes of fliers drift over the water from the west and must be dealt with promptly. As cool as it was at first, this stage was a source of great frustration for me due to its difficulty (in getting a rainbow), which leads me to a problem with the expansion as a whole.

Splash Damage. The source of my torment.

Even the stages marked "easy" are totally insane. I understand that this expansion is geared towards people who pulverized the original game and want more challenges to tackle, but having the barrier of entry this high is a bit ridiculous. It took me hours to finally rainbow Splash Damage and that was only because I meticulously planned the placement of every single tower on the map after countless attempts.

If you aced the original game and you have a burning desire to walk through the fires of Hell, this expansion will definitely delight you. It's not easy. There are more monsters of greater variety and they are -- as always -- merciless. You've been warned.

Otherwise, Encore just delivers the aforementioned levels and a few new tunes to boot. In case you're curious, the new songs -- also by Otograph -- are in line with the previous pieces and invoke a very mellow but still playful mood to the experience. It was nice to see that music was addressed in an expansion pack, because from my experience that's often overlooked.

The Verdict

Here's what it boils down to: Encore is currently available on the PlayStation Store for $5.99 while the original, full game is $9.99. That's pretty pricey for an expansion pack, considering the full game price point, but I admit that you are getting content that'll last a while. The core PixelJunk Monsters experience is unchanged in Encore, and the expansion really just provides more of the same content to enjoy. If that's alright with you, you certainly won't miss your six dollars.